R.I.P Walter Cronkite: America and the World have lost a Giant

Walter Cronkite was more than the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981. He was News, period.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - We have lost an American treasure; the last objective newsman; a man whose golden voice and demeanor revealed an approach to broadcasting the news which is quite simply, gone, never to return.

I will never forget the influence he and his broadcasting had upon me for so many years of my life. As a child, he told me that my hero, John F. Kennedy Jr. had been shot.

I wept uncontrollably as he took me through the horror with honesty, empathy and with the fatherly demeanor I so desperately needed as I seemingly lost my childhood innocence and hope for a better world on that dark day in Dallas. I kept a scrapbook of the details of the horrible tragedy which my mother still keeps.

Walter Cronkite was more than the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981. He was News, period.

He not only took us through the trauma of President Kennedy's assassination, he communicated the sheer horror we felt at the evil killing of our champion, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He told us the truth. He told us what we really needed to hear without his own spin. We could always believe Walter Cronkite as he reported about the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

This was a man whom we could actually trust. He guided us through our National traumas and always helped us to smile at our our National celebrations.

In the midst of the Vietnam debacle, we could depend upon his reporting to be honest as well as sympathetic. He resisted the ever present temptation to succumb to the political pulls from every side.

He always ended his newscasts with "And THAT's the way it is," and you knew it truly was.

America has lost a giant. Rest in Peace Walter Cronkite.

Thank you.

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